Energy saving in facilities such as houses and office buildings has been an important issue for countermeasures against global warming, effective utilization of energy resources, and reduction in energy usage cost.
Recently, attempts have been made to: remotely collect information about the working state or energy consumption of equipment devices of the facilities; visualize, for administrators of the facilities or users of the facilities, data such as the energy consumption of the equipment devices or results obtained by subjecting the data to statistical processing via a LAN (Local Area Network) or a wide-area communication network (WAN (Wide Area Network)); and encourage energy saving activities of tenants or monitor/control electric power systems containing natural energy, dispersed power sources, storage batteries, and/or electric vehicles. Realizing high-quality and highly-efficient information collecting techniques is required in order to realize these attempts.
The configuration of an information system that realizes these attempts can be roughly divided into three, i.e.: (1) a device or software for visualization or monitoring/controlling; (2) communication media and communication devices for outputting the data such as energy consumption from the equipment devices in the facilities via a LAN or a WAN; and (3) a data collecting system, which collects the data via the communication devices, the LAN, or the WAN and provides the data to (1).
The data collecting system is required to carry out high-quality and highly-efficient collection of data such as energy consumption from the equipment devices in the facilities mainly via the wide-area communication network.
Herein, the “high quality” is realized when the data collecting system satisfies the conditions (for example: data collection at constant intervals, defectless data collection, and data collection that keeps time limit specified by an application) required by the application (for example: the above described device or software for visualization or monitoring/controlling), which uses the collected data. In order to do this, the data collecting system requires a function that receives inputs of requests of the application about the data collection and a function that interprets the requests and controls data collecting operations.
The “high efficiency” is realized when the data collecting system collects as much data as possible at a higher frequency within the range of restrictions (examples: upper limit of data inquiry frequency, and the communication band of the data collecting system) on communication of the facilities and equipment devices serving as the targets from which data is to be collected. In order to do this, a function that recognizes the restrictions on the communication and a function that controls the data collecting operations based on the restrictions on the communication are required.
Particularly, outputting data with the intermediation of the wide-area network is not a presupposition for the processing abilities of the communication media and communication equipment connected to the facilities and equipment devices, and the processing abilities are often lower than those of general information processing devices. Therefore, it is important for the data collecting system to carry out the data collecting operations that take the restrictions into consideration.
Herein, a technique that periodically collects data of, for example, sensors from a plurality of communicating nodes is used in a communicating system used in the monitoring and control of mechanical equipment and electric equipment in properties such as factories and offices; however, carrying out the data collection via the wide-area communication network is not sufficiently taken into consideration.
For the disaster prevention applications and so on, data collection of, for example, sensors at remote locations is also carried out; however, communication lines having ensured communication quality (for example: communication bands and working rates) are used in many cases, and carrying out the data collection via the communication network having comparatively low quality is not sufficiently taken into consideration.
As described above, in the operation in which the data collecting system collects the data about the equipment devices installed in the facilities via the wide-area communication network, there have been problems that the control of the data collecting operation based on the characteristics of communication with the equipment devices of the facilities via the communication network cannot be carried out and that the requests from the above described application about the data collection cannot be satisfied.